The Clothesline Roof

Lyrics

I take the back way up. Always.
The main stair is for show, this one's for work.
The wicker basket digs into my hip bone, a familiar bruise.
Up past the second floor, the Servant's Stair Landing is quiet today.
The door to the Grandmother's Room stays shut. I don't look at it.
Some thresholds you learn not to cross, not even with your eyes.
The weight in the basket is the weight of a week. Sleep and sweat and meals.
Past the heart of the house, up into its head.
The air thins, cools. Smells of cedar and time.
A quick glance into the Main Attic, where the furniture sleeps under its own white sheets.
Another flight, steeper now, spiraling tight.
My knuckles graze the plaster wall. Almost there.
The sky is waiting on the other side of this metal hatch.
And the hatch pushes open to a fist of wind and a low slate sky.
This is where the house breathes out.
Up here on the roof, with the galvanized wire and the city laid out like a map.
Pin the secrets to the line. Let the wind read them.
White flags of surrender to the day.
My pockets are full of wooden pins. I hold two between my teeth.
The damp chill of cotton, the heavy sag of the line as I work my way across.
One for the Master Bedroom, big enough to be a sail.
One for the Nursery, small enough to break your heart.
There's a rhythm to it. Reach, pin, release. Reach, pin, release.
The smell of clean, wet linen fighting the coal soot from the chimneys.
This is good work. Honest work.
I pull a corner taut, and the sheet snaps. A sound like a whip crack.
And that sound, that sharp report... it has the exact cold, metallic taste of a key.
The kind of key you hold under your tongue to keep it hidden.
The key to a room you’re not supposed to have.
I swallow, and the taste is gone.
I remember hanging things that never were. A christening gown for a child never born. Tablecloths for a dinner party that was cancelled by a telegram in 1943. 
They all flap together. The real and the almost-real.
In the right light, this whole roof is a book.
Each sheet a page, the stains are the words.
A wine spill from 1968. A grass stain from a boy's knee in 1982. A tear that was never mended.
They tell the whole story, right here, to the pigeons and the sky.
The hatch is open to a fist of wind and a low slate sky.
This is where the house breathes out.
Up here on the roof, with the galvanized wire and the city laid out like a map.
Pin the secrets to the line. Let the wind read them.
White flags of surrender to the day.
All in a row now. A white forest, shivering.
They billow and fill. Ghosts in the wind.
The sun is going down. Another day washed and hung out to dry.